Chris Worfolk's Blog

When I read the Wikipedia page on this novel, it described it as being on of the greatest works of literary nonsense ever written. High praise indeed.

The title is often shortened to Alice in Wonderland, which lets be honest, is a far snappier title. Though not technically a correct one. The film adaptation released a few years ago also chose to shorten the name.

As a children’s book, it was a relatively short read and kept the pace moving along at a good pace so even I didn’t get too bored any any point. It does leave you thinking that real life is rather boring though.

Having been watching the TV series, I’ve also been reading the book as well.

It’s not been a bad read, but I really think it speaks highly of the TV series that actually includes most of the details.

Sadly, I can’t think of a better example than Harry Potter. But if you take Harry Potter, the novels are great because they contain large story arcs and extra details that are entirely missing from the films. I didn’t find this to be the case with A Game of Thrones – the TV series has covered pretty much all the book.

As I’ve said, that isn’t really a fault of the book though, which was definitely worth a read.

As part of Leeds Business Week, the Leeds Toastmasters clubs came together to put on an event “Pitch Perfect”. It turned out to be a huge success with positive feedback from many of our participants and lots of interests in the clubs. Congratulations to Pierre and everyone else involved in bringing it together.

For our September meeting, Ian Bushfield presented a talk entitled “Skeptics with an Eh: A view of the Canadian Skeptical movement”.

Earlier this month we had our club speech contest. Our Immediate Past President Jude begun with a speech entitled “When The Going Gets Tough”.

I followed with my speech “The Man Who Couldn’t Stop Evaluating”.

But our winner was Michael J. Clarke with a speech entitled “Never Say No”.

Earlier this year, Leeds got it’s own Speakers’ Corner. Thanks to Elina is now has it’s own website too. If you want to keep up with all the latest updates by subscribing to the mailing list, see the Speakers’ Corner Leeds website. It’s one of the few groups I’m not running lol.

Yet another xkcd comes to life in the real world.

Following the popularity of his poem on his blog, Jonni committed it to video last weekend. Here it is…

Last weekend, we went down to Corporation in Sheffield to attend the Alternative & Burlesque Fair.

Was it worth it? No. To be honest, I found it so disappointing that I’m not sure I would have even gone to it even if it had been in Leeds, if I had known what it was like.

I don’t think the stalls were are numerous as I was lead to believe and there was nothing particularly interesting there. There were also some stage shows, but the one we saw was just a burlesque dance. That’s probably expected given the name, but the reality of it is that it is just stripping out of slightly fancier clothing.

At £5 to get in, it is not worth a visit in my opinion.

I don’t watch much TV. Who has the time? Then people talk about box sets as if it is still 2007 and we all have DVD players. But Game of Thrones is proving to be one of the rare exceptions.

I’ve now watched the first two series and it quickly turned into a love hate relationship. My favourite characters keep dying. It’s very annoying. You get attached to someone and then his head comes off.

But as the same time, a medieval drama with dragons and snow zombies – what isn’t awesome about that?